Haerandir

I figure that kind of thing goes under special effect.  Grond does a grab maneuver, and gets something: On The Mighty Sampson, he grabs hair.  On Cape Girl he grabs cape.  If you really wanted to you could build the character with like a -1 DCV vs grab maneuvers (hero form only for Cape Girl).

Honestly, I have difficulty believing that any superhero who engages in hand-to-hand or flies through obstacle-laden environments on a regular basis wouldn't design their cape to tear away easily. Or not wear a cape, of course.
 
Now that I'm playing CoH again, all of my caped characters have brooch/pin fasteners, rather than the obvious choking hazard that is the full mantle. 

Yes, sort of?
 
I created a longish list of known mutations and 'syndromes,' and a shorter list of super soldier serums and other mutates.
 
I did a similar thing with super tech. And an even sketchier one with magic. 
 
Together they constituted loose campaign limits based on the most common special effects.
 
But they werent binding or anything, a mutant that didn't fit into an existing category just expanded the list. 
 
 

For a hobby that's been in media crosshairs since the beginning, I can't really fault whatever entity owns D&D for doing what they have to do to ward off the lawyers.  Filing the serial numbers off demons and devils hardly hurt the game, and dispensing with alignment is actually a huge improvement.  I can see how it might be problematic to be perceived as teaching kids that any given humanoid subspecies is fundamentally evil.  That idea could cause serious trouble if extrapolated to, like, reality.
 
Of course then we may or may not have to wrestle with the morality of killing sapient beings in a game where the entire point is to kill things with swords.  I generally avoid this in my campaign setting by depriving the bad guys of free will and small offspring.  Conversely my most recent 5e GM, with whom I have gamed off and on for thirty years, loves to pose ethical dilemmas to his players.  Sometimes it's interesting, sometimes I just wanna murderhobo.  Mileage varies.

I reckon we should avoid a discussion of social justice here, the moderators might object.

Now, see, you're trying to apply rationality to comics.  How often does that work?  Especially in that period, comics were escapism/wishful indulgent.  Who bought comics?  Largely, teens and young adults.  Hey, wouldn't YOU want a club of your peers, with actual respect from the adults, particularly at that age?

I also thought of the original Captain Marvel, as Billy Batson was a teenager. But he's a bit of an outlier, as well, given that his alter-ego was physically an adult and had the Wisdom of Solomon, making it hard to tell whether he still qualifies as a 'teen superhero'. 
 
Superboy is an interesting wrinkle I hadn't thought of.  IMO, he makes a better candidate as a template for the Teen Champions genre than Spider-man. He's explicitly a less powerful, less experienced version of a 'standard' superhero. One who, at least initially, deals with smaller-scale issues in a relatively restrictive environment. 
 
I might also reference the original Wonder Girl stories, but I don't need the continuity headache that would result right now. 

I also thought of the original Captain Marvel, as Billy Batson was a teenager. But he's a bit of an outlier, as well, given that his alter-ego was physically an adult and had the Wisdom of Solomon, making it hard to tell whether he still qualifies as a 'teen superhero'. 
 
Superboy is an interesting wrinkle I hadn't thought of.  IMO, he makes a better candidate as a template for the Teen Champions genre than Spider-man. He's explicitly a less powerful, less experienced version of a 'standard' superhero. One who, at least initially, deals with smaller-scale issues in a relatively restrictive environment. 
 
I might also reference the original Wonder Girl stories, but I don't need the continuity headache that would result right now. 

Back a couple of decades ago, I had a neo-Confederate group try to start a second US Civil War.  At that time it seemed far-fetched.

See, he probably thought he was losing that effort, but it was actually a hidden win

I tend to agree. I know there's been a lot of comments to the effect that Spidey's initial villains were a pack of losers, but they were pretty typical for the time. They tried to get Big Wheel and Stilt-man over, too. If you want to talk about a world-class hero having trouble dealing with an otherwise-ordinary dude with a gimmicked weapon, can I interest you in the Flash v. Captain Cold? Or Captain Boomerang? And it wasn't uncommon for writers to... adjust... the power level of villains and heroes for the sake of drama. I seem to remember hearing that one of the lesser bones of contention between Stan Lee and Jack Kirby was that Stan would take Dr. Doom, a villain intended to fight Thor, the Silver Surfer or the Fantastic Four on equal terms, and have him job out to whichever new scrub he wanted to hype that week. 
 
Also, I don't think "Teen Champion" vs. "Regular Superhero" is really a lens that can be boiled down solely to power-level. I feel like I could make a much stronger case for the core five original X-Men being Teen Champions than Spider-man. They lived in a school, had romantic entanglements with one another, and hung out at the local malt shop. Even their villains tended to come from within their own social circle of fellow mutants, and having a limited social circle is a pretty teenage theme. Sure, Peter was a student, but he also had a grown-up job in a professional field. He fought gangsters and assassins. He never had trouble getting to places outside of his neighborhood, or had to worry much about a curfew. He graduated from high school and went to college fairly quickly. He hung out with the Fantastic Four, Daredevil, and Captain America.
 
Tony Stark had to fit in his crimefighting around board meetings, Peter Parker had to fit his in around his class schedule, but if you made Peter 10 years older and gave him a job at Oscorp, his stories wouldn't really change much. When I hear "Teen Champions" I think "characters whose costumed career & social life both revolve around teen issues and concerns". To me, the occasional story beats where him being a teenager came up at all always felt more like secondary elements within the larger complications of his secret identity and down-trodden everyman-ness, rather than core themes that were uniquely difficult for him because he was a teenager. I'm talking about in aggregate, mind you. I can think of a few stories where him being a teenager mattered. His origin, for one, obviously. But overall, he moved in the same circles as Daredevil, and had pretty similar stories and struggles. 
 
Edited to add: Naturally, minutes after posting the above, I thought of a better way of expressing the point I was trying to make:
 
To me, Spider-man feels like an ordinary starting super-hero who is a teenager, rather than a character designed to be played in a campaign within the 'Teen Champions' subgenre. 
 
Now, you could make a case that Spider-man's popularity led Marvel and later DC to create many more teenaged superheroes, and that the Teen Champions campaign subgenre is based on those heroes, and thus Spider-man was Patient Zero for Teen Champions. I would agree with that. But teen superheroes weren't really a thing prior to Spider-man. There were teen sidekicks, certainly. But a hero who was still an adolescent who fought crime and had adventures independent of any other team or character? I can't say definitively that Spider-man was the first without doing more research than I have time for at 1:00 PM on a work day, but he was definitely the biggest. 

I once played in a campaign where this was the initial session. Bonus points to VIPER in that the big event at the restaurant was the official reception for us being welcomed as the new hero team for the city. I felt that was bold.
 
After the session, the GM told us they'd brought along a weapon specifically calibrated to target our brick's weakness, but because he kept trying and failing to break through the hatches in the flying ship, giving up and moving on to the next one, the crew spent the entire fight laboriously hauling the weapon from hatch to hatch, only to set it up and hear that he'd switched hatches again. They were quite put out. 
 
In a later session, we were raiding a VIPER base in South America, and they had lined the entire wall of the base with this same weapon, only to have him simply leap over the wall before they even realized he was there. This had the effect of making him enemy #1 for the entire organization. They were gonna tag him with a 'zero-zone projector' if it was the last thing they did, dagnabbit!

I tend to agree. I know there's been a lot of comments to the effect that Spidey's initial villains were a pack of losers, but they were pretty typical for the time. They tried to get Big Wheel and Stilt-man over, too. If you want to talk about a world-class hero having trouble dealing with an otherwise-ordinary dude with a gimmicked weapon, can I interest you in the Flash v. Captain Cold? Or Captain Boomerang? And it wasn't uncommon for writers to... adjust... the power level of villains and heroes for the sake of drama. I seem to remember hearing that one of the lesser bones of contention between Stan Lee and Jack Kirby was that Stan would take Dr. Doom, a villain intended to fight Thor, the Silver Surfer or the Fantastic Four on equal terms, and have him job out to whichever new scrub he wanted to hype that week. 
 
Also, I don't think "Teen Champion" vs. "Regular Superhero" is really a lens that can be boiled down solely to power-level. I feel like I could make a much stronger case for the core five original X-Men being Teen Champions than Spider-man. They lived in a school, had romantic entanglements with one another, and hung out at the local malt shop. Even their villains tended to come from within their own social circle of fellow mutants, and having a limited social circle is a pretty teenage theme. Sure, Peter was a student, but he also had a grown-up job in a professional field. He fought gangsters and assassins. He never had trouble getting to places outside of his neighborhood, or had to worry much about a curfew. He graduated from high school and went to college fairly quickly. He hung out with the Fantastic Four, Daredevil, and Captain America.
 
Tony Stark had to fit in his crimefighting around board meetings, Peter Parker had to fit his in around his class schedule, but if you made Peter 10 years older and gave him a job at Oscorp, his stories wouldn't really change much. When I hear "Teen Champions" I think "characters whose costumed career & social life both revolve around teen issues and concerns". To me, the occasional story beats where him being a teenager came up at all always felt more like secondary elements within the larger complications of his secret identity and down-trodden everyman-ness, rather than core themes that were uniquely difficult for him because he was a teenager. I'm talking about in aggregate, mind you. I can think of a few stories where him being a teenager mattered. His origin, for one, obviously. But overall, he moved in the same circles as Daredevil, and had pretty similar stories and struggles. 
 
Edited to add: Naturally, minutes after posting the above, I thought of a better way of expressing the point I was trying to make:
 
To me, Spider-man feels like an ordinary starting super-hero who is a teenager, rather than a character designed to be played in a campaign within the 'Teen Champions' subgenre. 
 
Now, you could make a case that Spider-man's popularity led Marvel and later DC to create many more teenaged superheroes, and that the Teen Champions campaign subgenre is based on those heroes, and thus Spider-man was Patient Zero for Teen Champions. I would agree with that. But teen superheroes weren't really a thing prior to Spider-man. There were teen sidekicks, certainly. But a hero who was still an adolescent who fought crime and had adventures independent of any other team or character? I can't say definitively that Spider-man was the first without doing more research than I have time for at 1:00 PM on a work day, but he was definitely the biggest. 

I once played in a campaign where this was the initial session. Bonus points to VIPER in that the big event at the restaurant was the official reception for us being welcomed as the new hero team for the city. I felt that was bold.
 
After the session, the GM told us they'd brought along a weapon specifically calibrated to target our brick's weakness, but because he kept trying and failing to break through the hatches in the flying ship, giving up and moving on to the next one, the crew spent the entire fight laboriously hauling the weapon from hatch to hatch, only to set it up and hear that he'd switched hatches again. They were quite put out. 
 
In a later session, we were raiding a VIPER base in South America, and they had lined the entire wall of the base with this same weapon, only to have him simply leap over the wall before they even realized he was there. This had the effect of making him enemy #1 for the entire organization. They were gonna tag him with a 'zero-zone projector' if it was the last thing they did, dagnabbit!

Here among the people of the great twisting river, amid the foothills of the Eastern mountains, the wintertime has seeded white the earth upon which we trod. These are the summerlands, and we know the ways of the white not. Our mighty steeds try to heed our direction, but their purchase upon the ice and snow is not as it would be in the sun filled moments, and so our riders pull too hard, or not hard enough on the reigns causing chaos along the roads we thought we knew so well. Plaintively we call upon our gods, and some have considered finding unsullied virgins to lay upon a rock in sacrifice, but we have already used them to no avail in our attempts to win the great drawing of lots, and perhaps to gain favor (Again to no avail) for our athletes in contests of strength and skill with their colorful helms! A brave people we, but the white unmans us, makes us skittish, and so we have descended upon the grocers like flocks of underfeathered ravens to pluck all bread from their wares. Eggs too, we have taken, for when the people of the Summerlands see the touch of winter, mad we become with ill omens and dark broodings of starvation. Little Debbie, our village protector, has left some of her sugary sweet mana on the shelves for when the bread is gone, so for now we survive.
 
This is the way of things.
 
In a moon or two, the unwelcome Winter will flee us as if it never was, and we shall be the Summerlands once more, where warriors will test their courage by walking up to sweaty ogres and asking "Hot enough for you?"
Battle may ensue
That too, is the way of things.

Nite Owl: "I want the truth!"
Ozymandias: "You can't handle the truth!"
 
It actually works pretty well.

It occurred to me rather belatedly that the gorgon was ripe for a patriotic superhero because you can't have Medusa without U S A !
 
And aren't the rest of you mad that you did not think of it first ?

On Thundara, jazz never dies.
 
Sun-Ra, the ever-living!!!

The Importance of Being Ernest Goes to Camp

The Importance of Being Ernest Goes to Camp

The Importance of Being Ernest Goes to Camp

The product of some forgotten mentalist's nightmare, some how made real; Horror doesn't know much beyond his origin, and is having a difficult time accepting and adapting to the "real world" (which he is not even sure is real, he thinks he might be caught in a nightmare himself).  He has a power to shift people mentally into the Nightmare dimension (this is a constant power, which if he turns it off, they come back, though they usually have had terrible affects of being in the Nightmare dimension).  He has difficulty controlling this power, often loses control of it, and can't figure out why exactly (it's as if it's always on, and he has to suppress it).  He is mostly incorporeal, and not even sure he's "real" in our world.  His power has a huge area of effect centered on him, and while he can keep team members and by-standers out of it, he often wonders why he does so, as to him, they are actually "going home", and he only wishes he could send himself there...
 
He has no malice however, and the fear his power causes others disquiets him, so he reached out to the team for assistance in learning to control his power, and to help him adjust to this world.  It has been a struggle.
 
He really wants to do good, but has difficulty understanding what our definition of "good" is, and is conflicted by the reaction to his power...

Re: Quote of the Week from my gaming group...
 
Another one from the Avengers Next game. The new Avengers are being questions by the press ... and the press is starting to ask some tough (even hostile) questions. Sorry about the length, but this one literally put chills up my spine. Kudos to Kolbrandr the Brave!
 
The question was in reference to the death of the Vision, which happened a few years previously:
"This is a question for Cinnabar," a reporter speaks out. "But I'd also like to throw it open to any and all the other new Avengers to hear their take on the matter. Cinnabar, your father's death was a terrible blow -- not just to you personally, but to the other heroes around the country, and to the nation as a whole. But his death brought home an important (and often overlooked) truth about superheroic activities -- that sometimes the good guys don't win. Can you share with us your feelings on this dangerous, potentially deadly job you're about to take on? "
 

Re: Quote of the Week from my gaming group...
 
GURPS Teen Supers: The whole Natural Sciences class has had an Origin Event while on a field trip. 36 hours later, the PCs and their immediate clique are still trying to keep a lid on things. Among the NPCs is Greta, who in the first 6 hours physically transformed from a bookish 5'3" girl who didn't need a training bra yet to a 6'4" cadillac-chucking valkyrie. The boys have all noticed that her figure has achieved comicbook proportions, especially the PC brick, Derek.
 
Derek: "Greta's gonna present a problem..."
[his hands begin moving up his torso in a cupping gesture]
"...'cause she's got tremendous..."
[hands continue smoothly up over his head as if to mark a height]
"...height advantage!"

Re: Quote of the Week from my gaming group...
 
All of our heroes are captured except for one. The captured heroes on next to a guilotine waiting to be executed.
Executioner: Any last words?
Me(Singing): I am the very model of a modern major general...